Have you played around with Cloud Foundry yet? I looked at it when it was first released a couple months ago, but hadn’t really used it since… until now! I’ve always thought that the Rails Contributors site is kind of cool, ha! So, I decided I should start something similar called “Grails Contributors” and use it as a way to learn about deploying to Cloud Foundry!

Just like Rails, Grails uses GitHub for source code management. So, I looked at the source code for the Rails version and it looked pretty simple the way it was calling the GitHub API. GitHub is actually in the process of upgrading to a new V3, but V2 is still active and V3 didn’t have the specific REST call I needed, so I decided to use V2 for now. I developed an initial basic version, put the source on GitHub and deployed to Cloud Foundry. Then I announced on the Grails mailing list that any other partners-in-crime are welcome to join!

To my delight, I’ve had two people submit pull requests! François-Xavier Thoorens from France and Felipe Carvalho from Brazil! François has been a rockstar and has probably written more lines of code in the application than I have right now! He designed the new interface and also had the great idea to expand it beyond just the Grails source and documentation by including Grails plugins! We have a good start, but there’s still plenty of work to be done! I also created a JIRA to see if we can get the CNAME http://contributors.grails.org like the rails version too! (Not sure if this is going to happen or not though)

I started out with the latest build of 2.0.0 and MySQL, but François and I later decided that we wanted to try out MongoDB and ran into some issues with the MongoDB plugin with 2.0.0. So, we switched back to 1.3.7 for now. The MongoDB plugin makes it incredibly easy to use Mongo with Grails!

So, if you have any ideas for ways to make it better, feel free to join us! All you need to run it locally is Grails 1.3.7 and MongoDB. I’m licensing all the code under Apache 2.0! So feel free to go fork the repo on GitHub and send me a pull request!